Paul McCartney provides nearly three hours of thrills at Bonnaroo

Sir Paul McCartney at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival on Friday, June 14, 2013, in Manchester, Tenn.

There was a lifetime of hits for Paul McCartney to cram into his near-3-hour headlining set at Bonnaroo on Friday night, but he couldn’t resist squeezing in a few stories of the old days with the tens of thousands of young folks assembled before him.

He told them about his friend Jimi Hendrix, who once performed the title track to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” only two days after The Beatles’ landmark album was released in 1967. But Hendrix’s guitar went out of tune quickly, and he asked Eric Clapton – who was in the audience with McCartney – to lend a hand. Clapton stayed out of it.

McCartney paused for a beat, and shrugged. “Anyway, a great memory for me.”

But McCartney’s memories play like myth to his youngest fans at Bonnaroo, who were born more than 20 years after his famous band called it quits. The concept of knowing Hendrix seems impossible to fathom, along with seeing the 1966 song “Paperback Writer” performed on the same guitar it was recorded with – a rock relic. Most of all, it’s more than a little mind-blowing to see a Beatle – at age 70, one of two the world has left, and a performer many didn’t count on ever seeing until he came to Bonnaroo – standing before them.

McCartney, of course, has survived the squealing highs of Beatlemania, so he wasn’t too thrown by the roar that greeted him as he and his band took the “What” stage a few minutes past 9 p.m. He stuck his hand out to the crowd, then playfully pulled it back, acting as if he’d touched a hot stove. And by set’s end, their unwavering enthusiasm had been noted. “You are something, Bonnaroo,” he told them.

His set – much like his first and only Nashville stop in 2010 – wisely darted between Beatles, Wings and solo classics.

He and his four piece backing band came out swinging with the Fab Four’s “Eight Days a Week,” one of many Beatles songs McCartney is performing live for the first time on his current tour. They fittingly followed it up with “Junior’s Farm,” which he and Wings recorded during a multi-week stay in the Nashville area back in 1974. Paul later learned this wasn’t much of a local crowd when he polled the audience. He asked who had come to Bonnaroo from outside of Tennessee, and after hearing a massive cheer, he replied, “Me too.”

Still, he shared other connections with the region. He introduced “Blackbird” by explaining it was written in response to the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, particularly events in Little Rock, Ark. Another audience poll saw that at least half of the audience members had learned – or attempted to learn – the song on guitar.

A few of his piano ballads might be better left on his standard tour circuit, but “My Valentine” from 2012’s “Kisses on the Bottom” was a crucial contemporary moment, and one dedicated to his wife Nancy Shevell. He mentioned one of his earliest solo hits – “Maybe I’m Amazed” – was written for his late first wife Linda McCartney, and was one of many tunes dedicated to departed figures in his life: producer Phil Ramone and late Beatles bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison.

In recent years, McCartney has become more apt to take on Beatles songs originally sung by Lennon and Harrison and his full-band takes on the Lennon-driven “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and Harrison’s “Something” were both surprising and moving bits of reverence for their work. The breadth of McCartney’s contributions to the band – from ballads (“Eleanor Rigby,” “Yesterday”) to high octane rockers (“Helter Skelter,” “Back In the USSR”) was plain to see throughout the evening, and the energy trended upward as the show neared midnight.

“You wanna keep rocking, don’t you?” he told the still-full field as he started a second encore with the clobbering “Helter Skelter.” He’d been reading fans’ handmade signs throughout the evening, and took one of their gifts – a stuffed walrus, referencing two Lennon-driven Beatles tunes “I Am the Walrus” and “Glass Onion.” He sat the gift on his grand piano and launched into the final number – a medley that closes out the last album the Beatles recorded, “Abbey Road.”

As confetti rained down on the fans up front, McCartney gave one last wave and vanished behind the accumulating stage fog – but on video screens, fans saw him keeping that energy up backstage, bounding into the darkness with an obvious spring in his step.